TWD: Chocolate Armagnac Cake

I've spent a lot of time flipping through Baking From My Home to Yours. I've read the recipes and all of the fantastic anecdotes that Dorie gives throughout the book. So, when I saw that this recipe had been chosen I thought, hmmm, isn't that the cake with the prunes in it? And then I had a sort of Winnie the Pooh-ish "oh bother" moment pondering what on earth I was going to replace the prunes with. It wasn't going to be raisins because I've never liked raisins, not even when I was 5 and obliged to like raisins. You see, I have a general distaste for dried fruit (or meat for that matter, no jerky here) and I'm not specifically discriminating against the poor prune. I pondered dried cherries, I like those, and I pondered just leaving the fruit out. And then I thought, oh what the heck, I'm going to make this recipe precisely as it's written, just for the experience. First step, procure the Armagnac and the prunes. That's easy enough. My dad likes Armagnac so I went ahead a got a normal sized bottle of it. I figure I'll eventually need it again for cooking or hopefully it's ok for someone to drink. The nice man at Pearson's (by the way, the BEST liquor store in NW DC as far as I'm concerned and they're super duper nice to boot) assured me that I could cook with it and drink it.


Now, this wasn't a difficult recipe, per se, but there were so many steps . . . and so many pans and bowls!

First, a pan for the prunes to get their trial by Armagnac fire in. By the way, this was my first attempt at flambeeing and I loved it. In fact, I might start doing it just for fun. I was so excited that I took the pan upstairs to show it to Dudley while he was studying. "Look! It's on fire!" I think the response that I got was something to the effect that he never knew he was dating a closet pyromaniac. So, to those of you who might be a little hesitant to flame up something in your kitchen, try this recipe because it's not nearly as scary as I thought it was.

Next, a bowl for the boozified prunes to cool and steep in.
Another bowl for your nuts (I used pecans and I was just this close to accidentally turning them into pecan butter), flour and salt.
Next, a bowl to melt your chocolate in. I chose the double-boiler method because I love my double boiler and I have a scatterbrained tendency to forget the I'm melting chocolate in the microwave and next thing I know, it's burned. But, should the double boiler count as one bowl/pan or two? I'm counting two because I had to wash two things on this step.
Aaaand, a bowl to whisk your egg yolks and sugar together, then to add the chocolate, flour mixture, and prunes (that's what those gobs floating in my batter are). At this step I thought, hmmmm, no KitchenAid here? Mustang Sally gets a rest today?
Or so I thought, because here's the bowl with my egg whites.
And here's the mixer bowl with the beaten egg whites.
And, after many bowls and many steps, here's my 4" cake pan ready to go into the oven.

And, after many bowls and many steps, I had a cake. I neglected to add the bowl that I used to make the frosting (at this point I did stand by the microwave and melt my chocolate because I didn't want to wash the double boiler again. So, for anyone who cares, and I have to say that I don't really care but it's just too funny to me that my little 4" cake used (drum roll please . . .) 10 pans/bowls! This is how I know that it's a restaurant recipe! Because I needed one of those awesome sprayers and an industrial dish washer to get through the dishes afterwards.

My cake had a big sinkhole in the top but, meh, I just covered it with the frosting and it seemed fine to me. I wish that I could say that I liked this cake . . . but I didn't. For my taste, there was just too much of the Armagnac flavor that came through and the prunes just sort of threw me off. I had pondered cutting the prunes into smaller pieces and I think that would have a much better result for me because then it wouldn't be chocolate . . . chocolate . . . chocolate . . . PRUNE! Unbeknownst to me, Dudley cut himself a piece of this while he was doing the dishes and, even though I'd shown him the flaming prunes, he didn't know that they were in the cake. Now, he doesn't like fruit desserts at all so I intended to warn him to eat around the prunes but I didn't get a chance before he ate one. I walked into the kitchen and here's the conversation that ensued:

Dudley: Are there grapes in this cake?!
Jessica: No. Do you like the cake? Do you think it's good? How do you rate it?
D: It's really good but what did you put in it?! There's some sort of fruit in it? What fruit is in this cake?!
J: laughing way to hard to talk at this point.
D: Did you put PRUNES in the cake?! (In a really high pitched voice). You tricked me!

For the record, I didn't try to trick him and that made it so much funnier to watch his face and his reaction while he firgured out that there were prunes in the chocolate cake. He actually loved the cake once he learned to navigate around the prunes. I think that I would've liked it in a different setting, like at a restaurant. I didn't hate it . . . I just wasn't in the mood to have a really boozey chocolate dessert that night. Oh well. As I mentioned before, my dad loves Armagnac and he also loves prunes so I think that he'd really like this cake and I think that at some point I'll make it for him.

So, thanks to Lyb of Then I do the Dishes for picking this week's Chocolate Armagnac Cake. Honestly, even though I didn't enjoy eating the cake I was very amused while I was making it and it was a very memorable TWD pick!

Note: Of course, it's only after reading everyone else's posts that I realize that I was supposed to cut the prunes into little bits. Duh. Because that would've made so much more sense! Once again I'm caught not reading all of the recipe. Next time, next time!